Churcher A Screen Acting Workshop

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78001-316-9
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

A comprehensive training course in screen acting by an internationally renowned teacher and acting coach who has worked with actors of all backgrounds and experience - from drama school students at the start of their careers to Hollywood stars, including Daniel Craig, Angelina Jolie and Keira Knightley. Mel Churcher has developed a series of five workshops which take actors step by step through the process of creating, developing and delivering assured performances on screen. Accompanied by ninety minutes of online film clips, showing all of the work in action, this book builds on these workshops and lets you progress through them at your own pace: - Workshop 1: Keeping the Life encourages you to find what is unique about yourself and how you can preserve this vitality when acting on screen - Workshop 2: Inhabiting the Role focuses on the emotional and psychological steps required in preparing your performance - Workshop 3: The Physical Life introduces a series of practical exercises to develop the physicality and imagination of the actor - Workshop 4: Through the Eye of the Camera explains the technical skills you must master to act in front of a lens - Workshop 5: Off to Work We Go covers how to prepare for auditions and then how to handle specific challenges when you get the jobEach exercise, technique and tip is vividly illustrated in online film clips taken from the author's actual workshops. The result is a vital masterclass in every aspect of acting on screen. Foreword by Jeremy Irons. 'When the whole business seems to have gone loopy, dip into Mel Churcher's book; somehow she always makes sense' Bob Hoskins

Mel Churcher is an international acting, dialogue and voice coach who has worked with companies including the Royal National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, Young Vic, Royal Court Theatre and Graeae Theatre Company. She is one of the top acting and dialogue coaches in TV and movies, and has worked with some of the biggest stars of stage and screen. She is the author of A Screen Acting Workshop (2011) and The Elemental Actor (2023), both published by Nick Hern Books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Churcher, Mel

Leseproben

Workshop 1 Keeping the Life

Workshop
1

Introduction

I was an actor once, so I know what it’s like to go in front of the camera. I know about the actor’s nightmares the night before filming, the butterflies in the stomach, the panic that rises when you forget your lines, the dry mouth, the racing heart, and the performance that’s over before it began.

A long time ago, I started teaching and directing and trying to calm other people who were going through what I used to experience. I began to see how the responsibility of trying to be ‘good actors’ was getting in their way. How seeking a feedback that they were really ‘feeling’ was leading to the opposite effect. How when they said it felt ‘too easy’, it had suddenly become real and powerful.

I first worked as an acting coach on a film around twenty years ago and since then I’ve been standing around on a set for months at a time, watching the monitor for twelve hours a day on more than forty major films and television productions. I have been lucky enough to see many different directors at work and to watch how the actors’ performances grew and changed with the input of those around them. I have also taught thousands of actors and would-be actors in workshops and studios both in groups and in one-to-one sessions. Out of this work came my first book, Acting for Film: Truth 24 Times a Second, which is a thorough overview of all aspects of film acting. Now, I want to share my practical workshops, designed to prepare you further for your work on camera – work that is not only magic and instant but also long and tedious.

Marlon Brando said, ‘Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long.’

Drama schools are a wonderful way to train, but they also fill you with so much information that it is sometimes hard to let it go in the moment of performance. You have to trust that, once you have done all the homework, you simply need to believe in the situation and ‘be there’. Just do what you need to get what you want – like life. And let the preparation take care of itself. You need to be able to go back to having total belief in your imagination as you did when you were five and knew that the ghosts were after you at the bottom of the garden, or the spaceship would arrive at any moment to whisk you away, or that the area under the hedge was the hut you had built on your tropical island. [Click here Introduction]

Most of us run around through life worrying about the future or dwelling on the past. Whatever your role is doing, you, the actor, have to be in the here and now in order to inhabit that role. It is a precious accomplishment to stop time. The actor and director Maria Aitken says of comedy, ‘There is only one moment and that moment is now’; D. H. Lawrence talked constantly of ‘the living moment’; Eckhart Tolle wrote a bestselling book called The Power of Now, and to quote T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Burnt Norton’:

“   What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.

An actor has to find that power – to stop time, to be present in the present. That is the joy of our work. That is why we train.

If training hardens into one ‘technique’ or ‘method’, it ceases to be fluid and personal. You have to find what works for you and create your own perfect mix. Over time, by being eclectic and going down many different routes, I’ve discovered what I find the most helpful advice for actors working on screen:

   You should be as clean and as open as a child. And play the game with the same commitment and energy and total belief as a child. Make no decisions about how to play.

   You need to find ways to engage your whole body in that game, to store specific muscle memory, pictures and sense awareness. It is not enough simply to think about the part.

   You have to separate the preparation from the doing. You add to your subconscious during preparation, and you are solely in the present, engaging with your role’s conscious thoughts, during playing.

   You have, at the deepest level, to be working from yourself. Which brings us back to my first point. Children are not confused. They play their roles as if they themselves are the roles. Then they stop and go to tea.

What would I most like you to experience in the moment of doing your work in front of the camera? A freedom, an ease, a simplicity, a spontaneity and a release from knowing and deciding. To be as free in ‘the moment of now’ as you should be in life. It is as if you stand by a closed door, knowing where you belong in the world, knowing who might be waiting inside, responding to a need that makes you open the door and go in. But with no knowledge of what will happen next.

The Natural versus the Unnatural

Playing, imagining, empathising is natural. The child plays through the imagination and belief in the situation that the game has conjured up. We care for others because our imaginations say, ‘What if I were in this situation…?’

Reading squiggles on a page, learning the words they represent and then having to speak them exactly as they are written is not like life. Being asked to move to a particular spot, gesticulate in a certain way and then speak those lines of love in front of a camera and several hundred technicians is not natural.

In life, we never speak or move without an impulse, a need. To take prescribed words and moves and then to have a need so strong and so precise that it can only result in those words and moves is an unnatural act.

No one can teach you the natural but the unnatural can be learnt. You can wake up the child in you to release the natural and acquire the unnatural craft of the expert you must become. You need to mix the folly and bravery of the child with the wisdom of the sage. And it will be a joyful lifelong endeavour!

You are Unique

Nobody does ‘you’ like you. You are unique. You are your best asset. When you go to an audition, you are not in competition with other actors. Only you can offer your particular viewpoint of the world, your embodiment of the role. The other actors are offering their unique visions. Which version the director chooses to buy is a different matter. You may not get the part but it is as if the director chooses Aphrodite over Athene or Dionysus over Apollo, the Nile over the Tigris or the Thames over the Loire, Brando over Bogarde or Garbo over Monroe. Although only one person can be chosen for the role, no one else will play it like you. So no one is competing with the way you will play it.

What you must do is release the brakes you put on yourself. You need to trust your power of belief and thought. You need to believe that you and the role are one. Then your interpretation of the part will come fully alive and the director can make an informed decision. Directors are not psychic and can’t see the talent inside you unless it is revealed. And when you get the part, you want the role to be as alive and extraordinary and unique as you are yourself. [Click here 1.0, 1.1]

See how alive people’s eyes and faces are in life! As Georgia talks about her quarry dive, the pictures in her head are so strong that she uses gestures all the time to recreate them for her audience and in reaction to what she sees and how she feels about it. Ana’s eyes move upwards as she sees the pictures in her head again. Notice how, as she empathises with the dog’s plight, she actually ‘becomes’ the dog. Will feels his fear again as he sees the bungee jump he has to do. He feels the rope around his ankles and sees the drop beneath him. Marion relives her ordeal moment by moment. Watch her ‘see’ the big ship and then her son and dog in her canoe. Daniela relives the absurdity of her story even before she tells it and the vivid pictures it evokes make her laugh helplessly – so we laugh too.

What About the Character?

Scripts with an Arc

‘…so you see Max, I’m really you and you’re really me…’

‘I’m a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude – you’re a dude who don’t know what dude he is.’ So says Robert Downey Jnr. as Kirk Lazarus in the film Tropic Thunder (2008).

I’m going to be controversial here. I hate the word ‘character’ – as in, ‘finding my character’ or ‘it’s a character part’. I do end up saying it occasionally in the course of a workshop because it’s sometimes hard to find an alternative – but I prefer the word ‘role’.

So often, when actors think of their ‘characters’, it is as if they hold up a cardboard cut-out in front of themselves. ‘My character…’ they...